The Utter Futility of Reducing Carbon Emissions

Thursday, December 30th, 2010

Studies by Raval & Ramanathan (1989) estimated that the greenhouse effect of a cloudless atmosphere is 146 W/m2 (watts per square meter) for the average Earth. They further pointed out that water vapor is accounting for most of this greenhouse effect, leaving about 8 W/m2 for the total amount of atmospheric CO2 — some 8%. In addition, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 4th Assessment showed that 3% of the atmospheric CO2 comes from man-made sources. Global gross primary production and respiration, land use changes, plus CO2 from the oceans totals 213 gigatonnes of carbon exchanged each year between the Earth/oceans and the atmosphere. The IPCC figure also shows man-made carbon emissions to be about 7 gigatonnes, bringing the total to 220 gigatonnes per year. So from this, we can see that making energy from fossil fuels is producing about 3% of the carbon dioxide added to the air each year. From that, the total human component of the greenhouse effect is therefore about 3% of the total carbon dioxide component of the greenhouse effect, which is 8%.

That gives us a value of .2% from man-made carbon dioxide. If you think that’s a small number you’re right.

Everyone loves frolicking in the winter: sledding, building snowmen, laughing at global warmists. OK, not everyone. The last one aggravates the global warmists, and they have a point: Weather is not climate. That it is cold here today does not mean the earth isn’t getting warmer on the whole over decades.

It’s not just the weather, though. Their climatic claims keep changing too. A reader sends along this item from the Environmental News Service, dated Dec. 14, 2009: “Snow and ice across the planet are melting much faster than anticipated, and the cryosphere — the Earth’s ice and snow cover — is very vulnerable to climate change, finds a new report presented today at the United Nations Climate Summit by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore and Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Store.”

But according to Judah Cohen, writing in the New York Times the other day, the opposite is occurring: “As global temperatures have warmed and as Arctic sea ice has melted over the past two and a half decades, more moisture has become available to fall as snow over the continents. So the snow cover across Siberia in the fall has steadily increased.”

So laugh away at the global warmists. And don’t even feel bad that they’re right about the weather-climate distinction. After all, they forget about it every summer.

All of this is neither here nor there. The readings of “global temperature” or “earth mean temperature,” even taken all together, are subject to reasonable suspicion with regard to their integrity and even if they weren’t, they tell only part of the story. They could very well be concluding this mean-temperature metric is on a steady upward trend, when it’s really falling…or vice-versa. The sum of all these measurements is as strongly related to what the earth is going to be doing over the next century, as local weather patterns are, to it.

If the global warming proponents were honest, they’d start a political movement with a name something like “sit on your ass and don’t do anything” — that’s what they really want. Global warming is just the excuse.

Moisture … has become …. available. Reeeeaaally.

Because, you know, 70% of the Earth’s surface is water, so, you know, without that summertime melting of arctic ice, we wouldn’t have the moisture for more snow … in the wintertime… when it’s frozen over again.

I think somebody’s grasping at straws. At the very least, somebody doesn’t have the slightest idea what he’s talking about.

You can never actually “win” an argument with a leftist (because liberalism by definition is never wrong about anything, ever), but you know you’ve functionally triumphed when they simply quit mentioning something. As P.J. O’Rourke gleefully pointed out, these same people were out there advocating the exact same communistic crap back in the Seventies, when (I quote P.J.) global cooling was the environmental disaster that would inevitably kill us all and the time to act was then.

We’re fully into the “grasping at straws” stage now. I predict that the latter half of the twenty-teens will be blissfully free of “global climate change” crap (like the mid-80s), until everyone notices that winters are pretty much as cold or colder than they used to be, at which point these exact same skinny ponytailed freaks will be out there beating the bongos for socialism in the name of preventing a new ice age.

Meanwhile vast swathes of China and India will continue to look like a Dickensian nightmare of spewing coal, but hey, you gotta have priorities….

“Weather is not climate. Weather is NOT climate. WEATHER IS NOT CLIMATE! ARRRGGH!”

We get it, Gore-bal warming chicken-littles. We all get it. Weather is not climate. Got it.

Meanwhile, can one of these people tell us exactly what the Earth’s “average” climate or temperature is supposed to be? Particularly since we only have around 200 years’ worth of reliable data – hardly a good measuring stick for millions of years of climatic change? Then there’s the somewhat-documented observation that the weather was warmer in the 1000s and 1100s than in the 1200s, and so on.

I really would like one of them to explain to me why the Earth’s temperature fluctuated naturally in the past, but this time, they’re sure it’s man-made.